.Got a spare $5,500 lying around that you want to get rid of? If every single San Franciscan coughed up that amount, we could pay City Hall's retiree health care bill - for now anyway.

A new report from the controller's office shows the city has an unfunded retiree health care liability of $4.36 billion. That means it'll cost that much to pay the promised health care benefits for every current employee and retiree - and that number will keep growing as health care costs rise. By 2033, the tab will be a whopping $9.7 billion.

Guess how much the city has saved to pay down the costs so far? You guessed it. Nuthin'.

Controller Ben Rosenfield pointed out that cities up and down the state are in the same quandary and that there is a solution. Rather than just paying current year health care costs, the city could set up a system similar to the way it pays pensions, paying into a trust fund that accumulates interest.

But to solve the problem, the city would have to start paying 15.4 percent of its salary costs towards health care every year. With a salary base of $2.4 billion annually, that would mean contributing $370 million a year. Remember, the city already has a deficit of nearly $400 million for next year.

And actually, this bleak scenario could have been a lot worse if voters didn't pass Prop. B in 2008 which raised the vesting schedule for new employees to 20 years rather than five and required them to contribute two percent of their salaries into a health care fund.

Guess it's time for the mayor and supervisors to write some really nice, pleading letters to Santa.

California regulators Thursday voted to cap the greenhouse gas emissions of the state's major industries and establish the nation's first broad-based carbon trading program.

The move marks another bellwether moment for a state that has led in environmental policy, coming as national climate legislation to regulate greenhouse gases and curb climate change has stalled in Congress.

"This is an historic venture," said Mary Nichols, chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board.

Under the plan, the state would cap each industrial plant's emissions in 2012, gradually lowering the cap over the next eight years. Firms would be granted allowances for each ton of carbon dioxide they could emit.

(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...

____________________________________________

These are going to be the first jackasses complaining abut gas prices, electric bills, and everything wildly going up in price.

The last three weeks I have traveled about, taking the pulse of the more forgotten areas of central California. I wanted to witness, even if superficially, what is happening to a state that has the highest sales and income taxes, the most lavish entitlements, the near-worst public schools (based on federal test scores), and the largest number of illegal aliens in the nation, along with an overregulated private sector, a stagnant and shrinking manufacturing base, and an elite environmental ethos that restricts commerce and productivity without curbing consumption.

During this unscientific experiment, three times a week I rode a bike on a 20-mile trip over various rural roads in southwestern Fresno County. I also drove my car over to the coast to work, on various routes through towns like San Joaquin, Mendota, and Firebaugh. And near my home I have been driving, shopping, and touring by intent the rather segregated and impoverished areas of Caruthers, Fowler, Laton, Orange Cove, Parlier, and Selma. My own farmhouse is now in an area of abject poverty and almost no ethnic diversity; the closest elementary school (my alma mater, two miles away) is 94 percent Hispanic and 1 percent white, and well below federal testing norms in math and English.

Here are some general observations about what I saw (other than that the rural roads of California are fast turning into rubble, poorly maintained and reverting to what I remember seeing long ago in the rural South). First, remember that these areas are the ground zero, so to speak, of 20 years of illegal immigration. There has been a general depression in farming — to such an extent that the 20- to-100-acre tree and vine farmer, the erstwhile backbone of the old rural California, for all practical purposes has ceased to exist.

On the western side of the Central Valley, the effects of arbitrary cutoffs in federal irrigation water have idled tens of thousands of acres of prime agricultural land, leaving thousands unemployed. Manufacturing plants in the towns in these areas — which used to make harvesters, hydraulic lifts, trailers, food-processing equipment — have largely shut down; their production has been shipped off overseas or south of the border. Agriculture itself — from almonds to raisins — has increasingly become corporatized and mechanized, cutting by half the number of farm workers needed. So unemployment runs somewhere between 15 and 20 percent.

Many of the rural trailer-house compounds I saw appear to the naked eye no different from what I have seen in the Third World. There is a Caribbean look to the junked cars, electric wires crisscrossing between various outbuildings, plastic tarps substituting for replacement shingles, lean-tos cobbled together as auxiliary housing, pit bulls unleashed, and geese, goats, and chickens roaming around the yards. The public hears about all sorts of tough California regulations that stymie business — rigid zoning laws, strict building codes, constant inspections — but apparently none of that applies out here.

It is almost as if the more California regulates, the more it does not regulate. Its public employees prefer to go after misdemeanors in the upscale areas to justify our expensive oversight industry, while ignoring the felonies in the downtrodden areas, which are becoming feral and beyond the ability of any inspector to do anything but feel irrelevant. But in the regulators’ defense, where would one get the money to redo an ad hoc trailer park with a spider web of illegal bare wires?

Many of the rented-out rural shacks and stationary Winnebagos are on former small farms — the vineyards overgrown with weeds, or torn out with the ground lying fallow. I pass on the cultural consequences to communities from the loss of thousands of small farming families. I don’t think I can remember another time when so many acres in the eastern part of the valley have gone out of production, even though farm prices have recently rebounded. Apparently it is simply not worth the gamble of investing $7,000 to $10,000 an acre in a new orchard or vineyard. What an anomaly — with suddenly soaring farm prices, still we have thousands of acres in the world’s richest agricultural belt, with available water on the east side of the valley and plentiful labor, gone idle or in disuse. Is credit frozen? Are there simply no more farmers? Are the schools so bad as to scare away potential agricultural entrepreneurs? Or are we all terrified by the national debt and uncertain future?

California coastal elites may worry about the oxygen content of water available to a three-inch smelt in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta, but they seem to have no interest in the epidemic dumping of trash, furniture, and often toxic substances throughout California’s rural hinterland. Yesterday, for example, I rode my bike by a stopped van just as the occupants tossed seven plastic bags of raw refuse onto the side of the road. I rode up near their bumper and said in my broken Spanish not to throw garbage onto the public road. But there were three of them, and one of me. So I was lucky to be sworn at only. I note in passing that I would not drive into Mexico and, as a guest, dare to pull over and throw seven bags of trash into the environment of my host.

In fact, trash piles are commonplace out here — composed of everything from half-empty paint cans and children’s plastic toys to diapers and moldy food. I have never seen a rural sheriff cite a litterer, or witnessed state EPA workers cleaning up these unauthorized wastelands. So I would suggest to Bay Area scientists that the environment is taking a much harder beating down here in central California than it is in the Delta. Perhaps before we cut off more irrigation water to the west side of the valley, we might invest some green dollars into cleaning up the unsightly and sometimes dangerous garbage that now litters the outskirts of our rural communities.

We hear about the tough small-business regulations that have driven residents out of the state, at the rate of 2,000 to 3,000 a week. But from my unscientific observations these past weeks, it seems rather easy to open a small business in California without any oversight at all, or at least what I might call a “counter business.” I counted eleven mobile hot-kitchen trucks that simply park by the side of the road, spread about some plastic chairs, pull down a tarp canopy, and, presto, become mini-restaurants. There are no “facilities” such as toilets or washrooms. But I do frequently see lard trails on the isolated roads I bike on, where trucks apparently have simply opened their draining tanks and sped on, leaving a slick of cooking fats and oils. Crows and ground squirrels love them; they can be seen from a distance mysteriously occupied in the middle of the road.

At crossroads, peddlers in a counter-California economy sell almost anything. Here is what I noticed at an intersection on the west side last week: shovels, rakes, hoes, gas pumps, lawnmowers, edgers, blowers, jackets, gloves, and caps. The merchandise was all new. I doubt whether in high-tax California sales taxes or income taxes were paid on any of these stop-and-go transactions.

In two supermarkets 50 miles apart, I was the only one in line who did not pay with a social-service plastic card (gone are the days when “food stamps” were embarrassing bulky coupons). But I did not see any relationship between the use of the card and poverty as we once knew it: The electrical appurtenances owned by the user and the car into which the groceries were loaded were indistinguishable from those of the upper middle class.

By that I mean that most consumers drove late-model Camrys, Accords, or Tauruses, had iPhones, Bluetooths, or BlackBerries, and bought everything in the store with public-assistance credit. This seemed a world apart from the trailers I had just ridden by the day before. I don’t editorialize here on the logic or morality of any of this, but I note only that there are vast numbers of people who apparently are not working, are on public food assistance, and enjoy the technological veneer of the middle class. California has a consumer market surely, but often no apparent source of income. Does the $40 million a day supplement to unemployment benefits from Washington explain some of this?

Do diversity concerns, as in lack of diversity, work both ways? Over a hundred-mile stretch, when I stopped in San Joaquin for a bottled water, or drove through Orange Cove, or got gas in Parlier, or went to a corner market in southwestern Selma, my home town, I was the only non-Hispanic — there were no Asians, no blacks, no other whites. We may speak of the richness of “diversity,” but those who cherish that ideal simply have no idea that there are now countless inland communities that have become near-apartheid societies, where Spanish is the first language, the schools are not at all diverse, and the federal and state governments are either the main employers or at least the chief sources of income — whether through emergency rooms, rural health clinics, public schools, or social-service offices. An observer from Mars might conclude that our elites and masses have given up on the ideal of integration and assimilation, perhaps in the wake of the arrival of 11 to 15 million illegal aliens.

Again, I do not editorialize, but I note these vast transformations over the last 20 years that are the paradoxical wages of unchecked illegal immigration from Mexico, a vast expansion of California’s entitlements and taxes, the flight of the upper middle class out of state, the deliberate effort not to tap natural resources, the downsizing in manufacturing and agriculture, and the departure of whites, blacks, and Asians from many of these small towns to more racially diverse and upscale areas of California.

Fresno’s California State University campus is embroiled in controversy over the student body president’s announcing that he is an illegal alien, with all the requisite protests in favor of the DREAM Act. I won’t comment on the legislation per se, but again only note the anomaly. I taught at CSUF for 21 years. I think it fair to say that the predominant theme of the Chicano and Latin American Studies program’s sizable curriculum was a fuzzy American culpability. By that I mean that students in those classes heard of the sins of America more often than its attractions. In my home town, Mexican flag decals on car windows are far more common than their American counterparts.

I note this because hundreds of students here illegally are now terrified of being deported to Mexico. I can understand that, given the chaos in Mexico and their own long residency in the United States. But here is what still confuses me: If one were to consider the classes that deal with Mexico at the university, or the visible displays of national chauvinism, then one might conclude that Mexico is a far more attractive and moral place than the United States.

So there is a surreal nature to these protests: something like, “Please do not send me back to the culture I nostalgically praise; please let me stay in the culture that I ignore or deprecate.” I think the DREAM Act protestors might have been far more successful in winning public opinion had they stopped blaming the U.S. for suggesting that they might have to leave at some point, and instead explained why, in fact, they want to stay. What it is about America that makes a youth of 21 go on a hunger strike or demonstrate to be allowed to remain in this country rather than return to the place of his birth?

I think I know the answer to this paradox. Missing entirely in the above description is the attitude of the host, which by any historical standard can only be termed “indifferent.” California does not care whether one broke the law to arrive here or continues to break it by staying. It asks nothing of the illegal immigrant — no proficiency in English, no acquaintance with American history and values, no proof of income, no record of education or skills. It does provide all the public assistance that it can afford (and more that it borrows for), and apparently waives enforcement of most of California’s burdensome regulations and civic statutes that increasingly have plagued productive citizens to the point of driving them out. How odd that we overregulate those who are citizens and have capital to the point of banishing them from the state, but do not regulate those who are aliens and without capital to the point of encouraging millions more to follow in their footsteps. How odd — to paraphrase what Critias once said of ancient Sparta — that California is at once both the nation’s most unfree and most free state, the most repressed and the wildest.

Hundreds of thousands sense all that and vote accordingly with their feet, both into and out of California — and the result is a sort of social, cultural, economic, and political time-bomb, whose ticks are getting louder.

Haah I live in California and I can tell you one thing...........minorities are fucking killing this state and I'll tell you why. I work with A LOT of minorities. Fillipinos, blacks, asians, persians, and mexicans. THEY ALL VOTE PARTY LINES regardless of the fucking issues and guess which party line they vote? DEMOCRAT!!!! I know this first hand because I'm a good looking, successful white "pogie" boy as the Fillipinos refer to me and so they all assume I'm some sort of conservative republican WHICH I AM NOT! Most of these dumbshit minorities have no clue how the fucking Federal Reserve works or who Ron Paul is. So that is why Jerry Brown and Boxer and the tide in CA is majority liberal democrats. The fucking minorities keep voting them into office...........and the public sector employees like the prison guards and big unions who are made up of plenty of white idiots as well. I've been point blank told by hispanics that they vote democrat regardless and always have and always will. Same thing with a lot of blacks.

California is fucked but I can't say Meg Whitman would have been a better choice than Jerry Brown. I mean they both sucked/suck. CA is a fucking disaster and the biggest reason is all the different cultures vying for their special interests. I mean it's symbolic of what is happening in the rest of the country for the most part. There are TOO different cultures living in America now. It will never survive. The hispanics want one thing, the blacks another, the muslims, etc. Living in CA it's the fucking hispancis that piss me off the most. It's funny......the Fillipinios are the ones that make up most of the nursing staff where I work and its the mexicans that make up most of the environmental staff......i.e.e the ones that clean the rooms, empty the trash etc. Meahwhiel the Indians, Asians, and Persians are making up all the doctor staff. Kind of interesting but kind of scary as well. Out of al the neurosurgeons I work with one is white, one is asian, one is african, and one is persian. Not one is mexican.

What isamazing t me is that mst minorities who come here flee hell holes tey came from, and then vote people in ho pomise to put into place the policies that will esult in the same ends as he mess they fled.

What isamazing t me is that mst minorities who come here flee hell holes tey came from, and then vote people in ho pomise to put into place the policies that will esult in the same ends as he mess they fled.

Yep there is some truth to that statement. I have this one idiot fucking Indonesian I work with who can barely speak english and makes 1/3 of what I do as a nurse yet got approved for a $600K home which he is now upside down on. He swears Obama is the messiah and will vote any democrat into office. I keep explaining to him about Ron Paul and libertarians but he is fucking clueless. These are the idiots that are now flocking to America................they might work hard......he does.......but it doesn't matter. They will still vote this country into the ground with party line thinking.

I do have to say that lots of the Fillipinos I work with are on fucking work visas and can't vote. But again that is another issue. I have AMERICAN BORN nursing students that can't find fucking jobs and we are letting foreigners come here to work on visas. What a joke!

California has been fundamentally transformed. The results stand as a warning to the rest of America.

I am a California native, born and raised here. I’m only in my early thirties but can remember a time when my Golden State was a completely different place.

Twenty, fifteen, even ten years ago California was a bountiful land of opportunity that beckoned all — Midwesterners to foreigners – to come here and make a fresh start, to take a shot at the middle class and beyond that the Golden State exclusively offered. California was one of the few places where one would not find judgment waiting for decisions in life or how one ended up here. Multiple-pierced tattoo artist/bartender starting a disco club/tattoo parlor business? No problem. Bearded, beaded, dreadlocked, thick-accented Rastafarian looking to set up shop? That’s just fine too, we welcome you with open arms.

Most cities and neighborhoods were clean, urban, and welcoming, not unlike typical suburban areas and cities across America. The San Diego area (and much of Orange County) had an almost Midwestern feel; values passed from that area of the country to new generations that had emigrated here wove a strong fabric into the population. The Central Valley was the same.

Looking back some 60 years ago, my grandparents came here from the economically downtrodden Texas Dust Bowl in search of the American Dream. Stories of the venture were told at the dinner table, seemingly pulled straight from the pages of a Steinbeck novel. My grandfather started out here performing menial tasks and odd jobs before landing his “dream job” — a full-time custodial position with benefits. This career was only interrupted once, as he was called for duty in the ‘40s. Since he was not physically fit to serve overseas, he was enlisted to serve in another way — by performing welding work on U.S. ships being built in Long Beach harbor. Sheets of steel touched and hewn by his own hand helped win the war. He and my grandmother later went on to raise six children and retire in the High Desert.

My grandparents on the other side came here from Missouri to find a better life, They found it in Redlands, California. The family worked an orchard and every “hand” in the family had a part to play. I think back to the vivid stories that my grandfather would tell of the family farm, at least when he felt particularly chatty – which was rare and special when it happened. A particular photograph of my grandfather as a small child that he showed me once comes to mind. He was sitting in the back of a Model T, “halfway to California from Missoura on the Tin-Lizzy Express,” he said. As a young man in his teens he was shipped off to India, enlisted and stationed to the U.S. base there. He never saw combat and came back home to raise four children. The man loved California and rests in peace with military honors at March Air Force Base near Los Angeles.

As I grew up in California, there were indications of what was to come — the creeping issue of illegal immigration, for instance, that, despite the will of California residents, continued to bleed state resources and slowly morph inland neighborhoods into veritable Third World mini-nations, linguistically and culturally cut off from the America we all know. The state’s body politic was a circus act, yet political clowns mostly left to their unnoticed devices due to the amazing wealth creation of Silicon Valley, Hollywood, world-class ports, industry-leading small businesses, and large corporations that found a welcome home here. Taxes, in most cases, were much lower than what they are today but rising. The education system was in decline but we were still not at the bottom of the list.

There were areas in Los Angeles and the Bay Area that featured neo-socialist zoning laws, mandates, urban sprawl, crime, and moral decay, but again, such was mostly off the public radar at the time and not part of the “typical” California experience, like that which I lived.

Today when I happen upon a city left unexplored since my youth, California’s incredible decline is like a splash of icy-cold water early in the morning. Save for the highly sought after and prohibitively costly coastal areas and affluent inland neighborhoods, the California transformation into a socialist, Third World underworld is breathtaking. Once brimming and shiny urban areas from the Oregon border to south San Diego are wrought with crime and decomposition, bearing no visual difference to the myriad slums of Mexico. Businesses are shuttered or replaced with marijuana dispensaries. Foreclosure signs continue to litter middle-class streets everywhere. The collective mood is near-depression and the near-depression 22% unemployment rate is left unabated.

Much of the acceleration of this decline is due to the financial crisis of 2008 and the heavy blow dealt to the state as Sacramento central planners in the past looked forward to continual prosperity and left rainy day planning for another day. The depth and severity of this economic downturn makes it much different than the dot-com blowup of the 2000s and in fact a structural crisis — especially pertaining to the state’s pension system — that the state may never recover from.

State parks have been shuttered or put on the auction block to stave bankruptcy. A recent San Diego example of this situation points to this – the world famous Del Mar Fairgrounds, owned by the state of California, was under tentative discussion to be sold to the city of Del Mar for $120 million, an effort to raise cash for the bleeding state coffers. Conservative independent estimates of the land put the value at five times that and some estimates are close to a billion dollars. But California, like a homeowner in foreclosure, has no choice but to sell off this prized state land at a fire sale price.

With my own eyes in California I have witnessed the perils of socialism and top-down collectivist government, the havoc wreaked by a blind eye turned to the rule of law, and what creeping and crippling regulations and taxes do to a once-thriving middle class. Neo-Bolshevik state lawmakers beholden to radical special interests joined hands with a neutered opposition party to fleece the world’s 8th largest economy, and my state reminds us of the moral destruction that the entitlement mentality and unfettered entitlements create.

In what seems like a lifetime ago, Barack Obama promised to fundamentally transform the nation. California is what a truly progressive government transformation looks like. Thus, in a sensible America, the decline of California would be the canary call in a coal mine for the nation. How can we let the progressive nightmare continue to happen to the nation when a state of almost 40 million (nearly a nation unto itself) has already experienced the disaster first?

Atlas has shrugged and California has changed – government has ruined this place and I will never forget it.

Comments (0) .One of the first opportunities facing Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., as he takes up the gavel as chairman of the House

Committee on Energy and Commerce will be to schedule hearings on the adoption last week by the California Air Resources Board of a Golden State-wide regime of cap-and-trade rules.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger departs Sacramento with approval ratings near the bottom of the barrel and clutching one so-called achievement -- this cap-and-trade regime that regulates the emissions of 260 businesses operating 600 facilities. The Terminator leaves a legacy that is, in essence, a script for a very expensive comedy.

The absurdity of a single state attempting to tackle climate control via the imposition of regulations on 600 facilities is wildly amusing. No one can argue that all the effort and all the costs, all the bureaucrats and all the rules will have any impact whatsoever on the climate.

(The proponents of this and related schemes are usually among the first to proclaim that fences along the border with Mexico won't deter any significant number of illegal immigrants -- thus putting the left solidly on the side of the impossible and adamantly opposed to the doable, again.)

Voters in the United States have come to the recognition that, even if the Earth is warming, there is nothing the United States can do to stop that rise in temperature as long as India and China remain committed to their development futures.

Thus no Democrat last year or in the coming year will run on the demand for a national cap-and-tax scheme. The demand for de-industrialization is a political death wish, and the departure of the Pelosi House buries cap-and-tax at the national level for as long as the GOP holds the House.

Sacramento's political elite knows this, of course, and no reputable scientist will aver that this new single-state scheme will have any impact on global temperature at all. But the theater of California politics required that something be done after all.

So for the purpose of a pose -- Hollywood's influence on California's politics is never insignificant -- the country's most important state economy is taking on a massive productivity-killing burden.

The new CARB regulations benefit lawyers like me who have served on a body like the South Coast Air Quality Management District Board, and consultants with friends in the pollution bureaucracies who can navigate the hallways to the right office where a friendly face can provide a permission slip of some sort for the right fee.

They also empower the business development arms of the various states now led by Republican legislative majorities and energetic, business-friendly governors like Ohio's John Kasich, Florida's Rick Scott, Texas' Rick Perry, Michigan's Rick Snyder, Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Pennsylvania's Tom Corbett, among others.

The job-seeking professionals accompanied by their smiling, just-elected governors will be happy to set up appointments with the governor so that a side-by-side comparison of life under California's new rules contrasts with life in, say, the Buckeye State.

Arnold's "legacy" is thus a job-killing, metastasizing bureaucracy that accomplishes only the destruction of jobs without even a miniscule impact on the world's climate.

Real estate agents across the Midwest, Texas and Florida will cheer Arnold as the best friend they ever had, and the once-great California economy will slip further into stories on Greece, Ireland and Spain.

Chairman Upton's hearings might serve the high purpose of exploring how California's economic suicide collides with the country's best interests and the Constitution's Commerce Clause, while also providing an opportunity to showcase his home state's business-friendly new government. Watch that space.

Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com..Columnistshugh hewittNEP

This is spot on. Presence of wealth on the outside, but a rotting core on the inside.

You see this all the time all over this city. Guys running around driving Porsches, Aston Martin's, Lambo's, and they are leased. Most of the guys couldn't get a loan for a Honda, let alone actually buy the car they are leasing.

Haah I live in California and I can tell you one thing...........minorities are fucking killing this state and I'll tell you why. I work with A LOT of minorities. Fillipinos, blacks, asians, persians, and mexicans. THEY ALL VOTE PARTY LINES regardless of the fucking issues and guess which party line they vote? DEMOCRAT!!!! I know this first hand because I'm a good looking, successful white "pogie" boy as the Fillipinos refer to me and so they all assume I'm some sort of conservative republican WHICH I AM NOT! Most of these dumbshit minorities have no clue how the fucking Federal Reserve works or who Ron Paul is. So that is why Jerry Brown and Boxer and the tide in CA is majority liberal democrats. The fucking minorities keep voting them into office...........and the public sector employees like the prison guards and big unions who are made up of plenty of white idiots as well. I've been point blank told by hispanics that they vote democrat regardless and always have and always will. Same thing with a lot of blacks.

California is fucked but I can't say Meg Whitman would have been a better choice than Jerry Brown. I mean they both sucked/suck. CA is a fucking disaster and the biggest reason is all the different cultures vying for their special interests. I mean it's symbolic of what is happening in the rest of the country for the most part. There are TOO different cultures living in America now. It will never survive. The hispanics want one thing, the blacks another, the muslims, etc. Living in CA it's the fucking hispancis that piss me off the most. It's funny......the Fillipinios are the ones that make up most of the nursing staff where I work and its the mexicans that make up most of the environmental staff......i.e.e the ones that clean the rooms, empty the trash etc. Meahwhiel the Indians, Asians, and Persians are making up all the doctor staff. Kind of interesting but kind of scary as well. Out of al the neurosurgeons I work with one is white, one is asian, one is african, and one is persian. Not one is mexican.

Great post McManus. Exactly why my brother and his family bailed on Cali a couple of yrs ago.

Say goodbye to your 100-watt incandescent light bulbs. On Jan. 1, it’ll become increasingly challenging to find one on a store shelf in California.

That’s because the state has ordered a phaseout of the high energy-consuming light bulb.

The state is pressing to have the old incandescents replaced with newer, more efficient bulbs, such as compact fluorescents, halogens and light-emitting diode light bulbs, or LEDs.

And beginning in 2012, 100-watt incandescents will be off the shelves completely.

As is typical, California is getting a jump-start on a trend that will begin nationwide in a few years. Three years ago, the federal government enacted legislation to phase out the old bulbs. National phaseout will begin in 2014. Other countries, such as Australia, Ireland and Cuba have already banned them.

There are drawbacks to the new bulbs, however.

Fluorescent bulbs, or CFLs, contain mercury, which can be harmful to the environment and to human health. Therefore, the bulbs must be handled differently than other household waste.

Local hazardous waste centers, and some hardware stores, will take spent fluorescent bulbs for recycling. The other bulbs contain chemicals such as bromine and iodine. These do not require special recycling.

Consumers looking to find a replacement for the old 100-watt bulb will likely choose the energy-efficient 72-watt bulb, which will provide an equal amount of light but uses less power.

"The consumer will still be able to use the product and have the same results to light an office, a desk lamp, a hallway. A 72-watt light bulb will still provide the same service as the old 100-watt bulb," Adam Gottlieb, a spokesman for the California Energy Commission, told the Scripps Howard news service. "Consumers really need to know they won't see any difference. The difference they'll see is a more energy-efficient bulb."

Gov.-elect Jerry Brown will propose a ballot measure to extend temporary tax hikes set to expire next year, while pressuring fellow Democrats to consent to billions of dollars in spending cuts in virtually every area of state government, sources said.

The tax package, planned for the June ballot, would extend higher vehicle, sales and income tax rates. It likely won't include additional new taxes, such as an oil severance tax.

Voters in May 2009 rejected Proposition 1A, a measure that similarly sought to extend the higher tax rates. To make the June proposal more palatable to voters, Brown's proposal would direct a significant part of revenue to local governments, while also shifting to local agencies responsibility for some services the state now provides.

While observers have for months expected Brown to propose a tax measure once he takes office next week, this is the first definitive indication that he will. The budget deficit is estimated to be as much as $28 billion over 18 months.

Growing up in California in the 1960s, it was impossible not to believe you lived in the greatest place on earth.

California had spectacular coastlines and mountains, luxuriant valleys and stretches of perfect weather that carried on unbroken for months at a time. Natives who ventured from the state -- to other parts of the country or the world -- invariably returned to say it was a mistake to ever leave.

In that not-so-long-ago era, a pioneering culture still gripped the Golden State. People came to California not take things from government, but to make things of themselves.

The first European settlers to arrive in California were Franciscan priests from Spain, who traveled to the far edge of the world as they knew it, not to enslave native peoples, but to bring them Christianity. They were followed by hardy souls who crossed an entire continent to reach the Pacific. When these pioneers arrived, they built magnificent things. The Franciscans built churches. The gold-seekers ended up building the city of San Francisco around one of those churches.

Because it almost never rained during the growing season in the San Joaquin and Sacramento valleys, where the soil would grow almost anything, the people built massive dams in the Sierras and directed water from there to channels that crossed and irrigated farmlands that otherwise would have been summertime deserts.

A group of California counties collaborated in raising private money to build a bridge across the Golden Gate -- and they did not build just any bridge, they built the most beautiful bridge in the world. Then they paid off its construction costs with tolls assessed only on people who crossed the bridge.

Not a single taxpayer in Massachusetts or Montana every paid a penny for the Golden Gate Bridge -- unless he freely crossed it and paid the fare.

As America's population grew and prospered in the 20th century, California outpaced its sister states.

From 1900 to 1910, her population grew by an astounding 60.1 percent, according to the Census Bureau. In the remaining decades of the 20th century, it grew by 44.1 percent, 65.7 percent, 21.7 percent, 53.3 percent, 48.5 percent. 27.0 percent, 18.6 percent, 25.7 percent and 13.8 percent.

After each Census, California won additional seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and gained greater influence over the nation's political destiny.

Then came the population count of 2010. Last week, the Census Bureau announced that for the first time since California became a state in 1850, it would gain no additional seats in the House.

Over the past decade, it turns out, next-door Nevada enjoyed the largest percentage population gain of any state, growing by 35 percent -- perhaps because it is the nearest place Californians can flee.

Who killed the California dream? Politicians did -- specifically, politicians who pushed a vision of big government that called for redistributing wealth and rewarding indigence while penalizing the hard work and calculated risk-taking that marked Californians of generations past.

In October, the Tax Foundation rated all 50 states by how their tax climate treated business. California ranked 49th. Only New York rated worst. The foundation also judged that California had the 48th worst individual income tax system and the 49th worst sales tax system.

With established businesses fleeing and new entrepreneurs choosing to go elsewhere, unemployment has been trending up in California for four straight years. It is now at 12.4 percent -- tied with Rust Belt Michigan for the second highest unemployment rate of any state.

The Census Bureau's 2010 Statistical Abstract says that from 2000 to 2008, 1,378,706 "domestic" migrants left California for other parts of the country. That was balanced by 1,825,697 "international" migrants (the Census Bureau does not distinguish between legal and illegal) who moved to California from other countries.

The Pew Hispanic Center, meanwhile, reported in September that 23 percent of the illegal immigrants in the United States -- or about 2,550,000 illegal aliens -- live in California and make up 9.3 percent of the state's workforce.

Unlike previous generations that migrated to California, these immigrants are not coming to a frontier, but to a welfare state. Whether they replace indigenous workers by taking their jobs or increase the burden of government on those workers by going on the dole, the illegal immigrant population is helping to build California's welfare state -- as are pensioned state-government employees and native-born Americans who have grown accustomed to government dependency.

In November, California's state Legislative Analyst's Office issued a budget report estimating that the state's government will face a deficit of about $20 billion per year for the next six years.

At the same time, it estimates that Medi-Cal (the state's version of Medicaid) will cost an average of about $20 billion per year (rising from $17.6 billion next year to about $24 billion in 2016). Currently, 7 million of California's 37 million people are enrolled in Medi-Cal.

There are now only 11 states, according to the 2010 Census, that are populated by more people than California has populating its socialized medicine system.

California's Legislative Analyst's Office assumed in its budget report that in the coming years California will continue to have a net outflow of "domestic" migrants. That was wise.

The fucking Dept of Agriculuture and FDA allow our meat to be shot up with ammonia and used in the school lunch programs and sold to fast food chains, our national parks are being overrun by mexican pot growers, our fucking kid's toys are riddled with heavy metals from china, our lakes, rivers and infrastructure is dying and decaying, the Gulf is an oil polluted mess and all the fuking government can worry about now is fucking 100 watt incandescent light bulbs? Geezus fack!

The fucking Dept of Agriculuture and FDA allow our meat to be shot up with ammonia and used in the school lunch programs and sold to fast food chains, our national parks are being overrun by mexican pot growers, our fucking kid's toys are riddled with heavy metals from china, our lakes, rivers and infrastructure is dying and decaying, the Gulf is an oil polluted mess and all the fuking government can worry about now is fucking 100 watt incandescent light bulbs? Geezus fack!

Where did you get this little bit of info? LoL.

The rest of the post is good stuff.

I think Cali is unsalvagable... because of all the minorities and welfare types here nothing non-radical liberal is going to get voted in. Hell, we just voted for a train system that is projected to cost a trillion dollars and never even break even. Trouble for the rest of the country is that the federal government will never let CA suffer. It's just a matter of time before a leftist administration in DC begins the bailouts for the state.

CA gets the dems into office on the federal level, so the Obama types are not going to let it fail.

Haah I live in California and I can tell you one thing...........minorities are fucking killing this state and I'll tell you why. I work with A LOT of minorities. Fillipinos, blacks, asians, persians, and mexicans. THEY ALL VOTE PARTY LINES regardless of the fucking issues and guess which party line they vote? DEMOCRAT!!!! I know this first hand because I'm a good looking, successful white "pogie" boy as the Fillipinos refer to me and so they all assume I'm some sort of conservative republican WHICH I AM NOT! Most of these dumbshit minorities have no clue how the fucking Federal Reserve works or who Ron Paul is. So that is why Jerry Brown and Boxer and the tide in CA is majority liberal democrats. The fucking minorities keep voting them into office...........and the public sector employees like the prison guards and big unions who are made up of plenty of white idiots as well. I've been point blank told by hispanics that they vote democrat regardless and always have and always will. Same thing with a lot of blacks. California is fucked but I can't say Meg Whitman would have been a better choice than Jerry Brown. I mean they both sucked/suck. CA is a fucking disaster and the biggest reason is all the different cultures vying for their special interests. I mean it's symbolic of what is happening in the rest of the country for the most part. There are TOO different cultures living in America now. It will never survive. The hispanics want one thing, the blacks another, the muslims, etc. Living in CA it's the fucking hispancis that piss me off the most. It's funny......the Fillipinios are the ones that make up most of the nursing staff where I work and its the mexicans that make up most of the environmental staff......i.e.e the ones that clean the rooms, empty the trash etc. Meahwhiel the Indians, Asians, and Persians are making up all the doctor staff. Kind of interesting but kind of scary as well. Out of al the neurosurgeons I work with one is white, one is asian, one is african, and one is persian. Not one is mexican.

Public-employee unions spent tens of millions getting Jerry Brown elected, but the new governor gave them the cold shoulder yesterday after his inauguration.

The Chron reports that the 18,000-member Orange County Employees Association had expected Brown to speak at its free hot-dog fest at the capitol, dubbed “The People’s Inauguration Party,” but the new governor only showed up for a few moments, grabbed some dogs, and scurried off.

During his inaugural speech, Brown told unions not to expect any favors and referred to a “philosophy of loyalty” that calls for a “devotion to California above and beyond our narrow perspectives.”

If we bail out CA, there needs to be something in return. Maybe force CA to make enough cuts to balance it's budget and repay the federal government within a given time frame. There is so much hatred for CA and their irresponsible spending that it would be a difficult sell to the American people.